BTC Sessions - Miner Proves CSW Fraud, 70K BTC Coinjoined, Iran Mining EP061

Starting point is 00:00:14 Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What's up everyone? I'm Ben with the BTC Sessions and this is your daily session. Before we dive in, I just want to give a shout out to sponsors of the show, leaden.io. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a few different services. They've got their Bitcoin backed loans. This is the first thing I ever used with them. It's where you use your Bitcoin as collateral to get a Canadian or US dollar loan. my instance, I was in a pinch, needed dollars, didn't want to sell my Bitcoin, so I parked my

Starting point is 00:00:58 Bitcoin in a dedicated address that I could audit 24-7, got a loan to my bank account within 24 hours, and when I paid that back, I got back all of my Bitcoin. Now, they've also got Bitcoin and USDC savings accounts where you can earn up to 7.5% interest annually, and they've got their B2X offering, and that's where you use the same loan mechanism to instantly buy more Bitcoin, effectively doubling your Bitcoin on the spot. If you want to check out any of this, there is a link down below in the show notes. And if you click that link and opt to use their loans, then you will get 50 bucks worth the Bitcoin for free.

Starting point is 00:01:31 And then secondly, if you want to help with this show in another way and you're not yet holding your Bitcoin in a hardware wallet, first of all, very good idea to do so. If you keep your Bitcoin specifically on your phone or on a computer just on a hot wallet, on a wallet that's on an internet-connected device, well, that is dangerous and you can easily be, taken for all your Bitcoin, you can be hacked. So getting a dedicated non-internet

Starting point is 00:01:58 connected device like a ledger is very important. So I do use a lot of different hardware wallets and ledger is one of them. They've been around for quite some time. I used them all the way back in 2014 was the first time I used a ledger product. And so they've been around for a long time. I use the ledger nano-s. I use the ledger nano-X. I use both. I also use, as I said, lots of other hardware wallets. But if you want to help out this show, there's a link down below where you can pick up any ledger items, and any time you do so, again, it helps out this show in doing so.

Starting point is 00:02:31 And with that, let's dive into the news. So bad news for Craig Wright. When is it ever good news for Craig Wright, really? Craig Wright being the individual pretending to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. Well, he's in a court case, which I've discussed on the show before, one of his former associates or alleged former associates, the family of that person, who has now passed away, David Klyman, is suing Craig Wright under the assumption that he is

Starting point is 00:03:01 Satoshi for half of his coins. Now, Craig Wright is trying to balance this awkward line between trying to keep his followers believing that he is Satoshi while also not having access to the coins that he would then owe to the Klyman estate if he lost the lawsuit, which is billions of dollars. Well, unfortunately for Craig Wright, he provided a document to the court stating that he owns something to the likes of 16,000 different Bitcoin addresses, but he could not access them because he did not have access to the keys and they were tied up in some sort of a Tulip Trust bonded courier type deal. Long and short of it is he says that the coins are there, they're his, but he cannot access to them.

Starting point is 00:03:48 Well, I'm going to read a little bit from this Coin Telegraph article detailing what happened. So a message signed by 145 wallets containing Bitcoin mined in the first years calls Craig Wright a liar and a fraud. The message was published on May 25th with a list of 145 addresses and their corresponding signatures. This seemingly proves that the addresses do indeed belong to the person broadcasting the message. The message itself reads, quote, Craig Stephen Wright is a liar and a fraud. He doesn't have the keys to sign this message. The Lightning Network is a significant achievement. However, we need to continue to work on improving on-chain capacity.

Starting point is 00:04:33 Unfortunately, the solution is not to just change a constant in the code or to allow powerful participants to force out others. Moving on from there, notably CoinTelegraph was in. able to verify that all the addresses can be found among the list of thousands claimed by Craig Wright in the case against Ira Klyman. Wright has on multiple occasions failed to produce proof of ownership of the alleged fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, who is believed to have mined more than one million Bitcoin. So, tough one for Wright. A lot of people saying that this is just another nail in the coffin for his claim to be a Satoshi.

Starting point is 00:05:16 Basically, at every single turn, he gets slapped down, and somehow he still has a following of minions that will just believe anything he says. And, you know, whether they just claim he's playing 40 chess and trying to get ahead of everybody by lying about certain things is irrelevant. Basically, everything that he says has been a lie and has been proven to be so. And this is just another such. instance. So good riddance, yet another thing. Again, I know some people don't even like me to bother talking about Craig, but I found this one particularly funny that somebody so early on in Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:05:56 that was mining so early on would take the time to sign this message and say, no, this guy's a fraud. Anyways, let's move on here. More Bitcoin than ever has been made private this month with coin join. So this article from Decrypt, it says more Bitcoin than ever has was made private this month through an anonymous strategy known as CoinJoyne. If you own Bitcoin but use centralized exchanges or other similar services, privacy experts say you should probably consider doing it too. Bitcoin Mixers use the coin join technique such as Wasabi Wall and Samurai Wallet have seen huge growth in recent months. And this was shown by Max Hildebrand, who is a contributor to Wasabi Wallet.

Starting point is 00:06:47 So 7, what is this? 70,000 Bitcoin in May alone have been made private so far. And this is a mix of Wasabi Wallet, Samurai Wallet, and Join Market. And so according to the data, 70,000 Bitcoin, roughly $644 million at $7,000. today's prices were made private in May. This cumulative total may be off slightly for false positives because a type of coin join called join market is quite difficult to track. However, Hilda Brandt is pretty confident that the numbers for Wasabi and Samurai are accurate. The other interesting thing about this is that the fresh Bitcoin's coin joined, ones that have not been through this process before, has also begun to rise again.

Starting point is 00:07:38 peaked at some point last year, but has been on the rise as well. So that means more people, more new individuals or new coins are taking part in the coin join process, further improving fungibility for all those that do so. So really, really cool to see. You guys know that I'm a huge advocate of coin join Wasabi as a partner of the show. And I also regularly use samurai wallet. and I think all of it is great and wonderful for people to use. I highly encourage you guys do that. This is particularly useful in what a lot of people don't understand about CoinJoin is, yes, if you use a centralized service to buy Bitcoin,

Starting point is 00:08:22 that service does have a record of you sending them money, using it to purchase Bitcoin, and removing it from the exchange. The danger there, of course, in using that centralized services, that data can be leaked. But beyond that, there's a further danger. If you have Bitcoin obtained from other services or peer to peer or you get paid in Bitcoin or whatever the case, if you have other Bitcoin and then you take the Bitcoin that you've used or that you've bought at a centralized service and it is not coin joined and then you put it into a wallet with that other Bitcoin that nobody knows where you got it from. And then you proceed to spend from that wallet and those

Starting point is 00:09:01 coins get mixed together in that spending process, well, that links all of the identified coins that people know that you own if they're looking at the blockchain and they get that information with the coins that previously were not linked to you. So people can very easily audit and paint a picture of exactly how much money you have, which can make you a target for malicious individuals that may want to track you down and steal your money. So again, I can't stress enough how what a wonderful tool something like coin join is for bitcoin users that are interested in protecting themselves and and keeping their their savings private uh let's move on a little bit and in the same vein of privacy and information uh being leaked out there a hacker claims to

Starting point is 00:09:53 have stolen data from ledger treasurer and keep key uh major hardware wallets now the interesting thing this is that it seems to not be substantiated. And so what information did this person allegedly get? I will read a little bit here. So, a hacker is reportedly selling stolen data from three popular hardware wallets, prompting investigations by at least two of the companies allegedly involved. The hacker claims to have stolen data from Treasurer, Ledger, and Shapeshift's wallet Keepkey. The allegations were republished on Twitter today by cybersecurity firm under the breach. And so what he's saying is that this individual claims to have breached the Shopify e-commerce website plugins for both Treasurer, Ledger and Keepke. However, the responses from Treasurer and Ledger, they say there are rumors spreading that our e-shop database, this is Treasurer itself.

Starting point is 00:10:54 Our e-shop database has been hacked through a Shopify exploit. Our e-shop does not use Shopify, but we are nonetheless investigating the situation. We've been also routinely purging old customer records from the database to minimize the possible impact. And then from Ledger, rumors pretend our Shopify database has been hacked through a Shopify exploit. Our e-commerce team is currently checking these allegations by analyzing the so-called hacked database, and so far it doesn't match our real database.

Starting point is 00:11:26 we continue investigations and are taking the matter seriously. So this individual is looking for money in exchange for this data. He also claims to have the database of what is it called Bank to the Future, which is an investment portal as well. They claim to have a lot of this information and are asking for a lot of money for it, but it could just be a cash grab with some unsubstantiation. data that the person has just made up. So what kind of data would be at risk if this were to be real?

Starting point is 00:12:04 It would, again, simply be records of who bought Bitcoin hardware wallets in these cases. So they would be getting stuff like the individual's names and, you know, when they bought these hardware wallets, what specifically they bought, where they were shipped to, stuff like that. this would not give them access to anybody's private keys or be able to steal anybody's money or even see what money they had other than again if you were you weren't coin joined and you were paying via bitcoin then feasibly this information could be in there of oh this person paid with bitcoin this is linked back to this wallet which holds this much in funds so that could be an intact factor there seeing how much you have but

Starting point is 00:12:55 It does not give the person direct access to anybody's coins or anything like that. It's more just like kind of an obsec issue. I kind of, this seems to me, again, like a bit of a cash grab, like the person's just saying they have this information, especially since it's not being substantiated by either of those companies, even through trying to investigate it and see what they had. So more or less, it seems to be a bit of a nothing burger, but it does, again, bring up the issue.

Starting point is 00:13:25 of making sure that you maintain your Bitcoin privacy and try to separate the links between you and your coins. Moving on, the Iranian president calls for national crypto mining strategy. Now, I find this article title to be a little bit misleading. It seems, it's a double-edged sword. It seems more positive than it is when I actually read here. So the president, Rouhani, told officials from the central bank of Iran, the CBI, Energy Department, and Information Communication Technology Ministries that they need to devise a new national strategy for crypto mining, including regulation and mining revenue.

Starting point is 00:14:10 The news comes barely two days after the Iranian parliament published a bill proposing to apply the country's strict foreign exchange and currency smuggling regulation to cryptocurrencies. The new parliamentary law would also require, require crypto exchanges operating in the country to first register with the CBI, possibly in a move to try and prevent too much capital leaving the country. Penalties for smuggling in Iran can include fines and imprisonment. So in one way, regulation is an admission of acceptance. So when you regulate something, you're not banning it. You're just saying we're setting out some ground rules here.

Starting point is 00:14:53 On the other hand, this also comes across as they know that they can't exactly outlaw it, or at least that outlawing it would not really be enforceable. And so we may as well try to set out some regulations and corral individuals by and large into a system where we can still have some degree of control and try to take our slice. That's kind of what this comes across as me. And I think you're going to kind of see stuff like this around the globe in varying degrees. But I think it'll all be for naught in the end because it's very, very difficult to clamp down on this kind of stuff. I think the stuff that gets through the cracks will become more and more prevalent and people will realize it's these central banks and these central entities that want to control the money are just seeing it slip through their fingers like saying.

Starting point is 00:15:53 And I think it'll continue to go that way, but we'll see regulations like this in the interim. Moving on here, just a short Twitter thread from at not grovels. I'm just going to read the tweets here, and then I'll give my kind of hot take on this as well. So Liquid can help free up a ton of Bitcoin block space for other uses. Think cheap coin joins. So Liquid being the liquid side chain created by Blockstream,

Starting point is 00:16:22 where you can utilize Bitcoin, you can peg out into a one-to-one liquid Bitcoin token. Moving on through the tweet here, exchanges need to get integrated so traders don't have to use the main chain. Jamison Lop estimated roughly 50% of outputs come from exchanges, of which most are inter-exchange transfers. Now take a look at Bitcoin fees spikes during big price. movements. They're just traders moving Bitcoin from one exchange to another. These transfers are better suited off-chain on liquid. And so a couple things here. I think it's absolutely right. If those numbers are correct and 50% of outputs are coming from exchanges, that's a lot, a lot of block space, which is a basically scarce digital resource that could be more efficiently

Starting point is 00:17:20 used. The other thing about individuals utilizing and trading on exchanges, if that's what they want to do, already, if you're putting Bitcoin onto an exchange, if you're putting Bitcoin onto a trading platform, well, you are trusting that trading platform to custody your coins. and when you're transferring between those trading platforms, of course, you're paying the on-chain fee for Bitcoin. You're at the mercy of what type of wallet addresses and how efficient and what the minor fees are set at, so on and so forth. As you transfer between exchanges, you also, if you're moving large amounts of money, while the Bitcoin blockchain is just completely, again, anybody can audit it and see those movements. And the settlement times can take a while. So if you're trying to execute multi-million dollar trades in quick order

Starting point is 00:18:22 and you don't want to give away your position while you're giving away your position by showing those movement of funds. And in that time, if people are already on the exchange you're sending to, they may try to interpret what you're doing and beat you to that trade. In utilizing liquid, in this instance, for large traders moving into exchange like this, I 100% agree in almost every capacity it is better. Why? Well, you're no longer trusting a single exchange with custody.

Starting point is 00:18:55 The way that Liquid works is a federated model where there's a whole bunch of different federation members and no one exchange has real control of the pegged Bitcoin there. And so instead of having to trust one entity, you're trusting basically the entire federation, or rather two-thirds of the federation to not be malicious, which, again, just inherently, by trusting more and more separate entities all in concert with each other, it's a much lower risk profile than just one entity.

Starting point is 00:19:35 If one exchange goes bust and your money is on that exchange, you're screwed. So in that capacity, it's much lower. Also, as I was saying, when you transfer into exchange, when you pay the on-chain fee, which on liquid will automatically be lower because of a couple things, their block times are only one minute long and transaction finality after two minutes. So that's another bonus. Cheaper fees, quicker transfers. Also, by default, every single transfer is a confidential transaction, meaning that the confidential part is you can't see what asset is being sent. whether it's liquid Bitcoin or whether it's a different asset issued on the liquid side chain. And you cannot see the amount.

Starting point is 00:20:22 So you don't give away the position of even what you're trying to do. So, yeah, I think it's a no-brainer for people that are parking a lot of money in exchanges and trying to make large trades already. I think it's just a matter of time before liquid kind of becomes that default. and trust minimizes a lot of these actions that required a lot of trust previously. So, yeah, interesting to see these numbers, though. I didn't know. 50% of payment outputs coming from exchanges.

Starting point is 00:20:54 Wow. Last thing, I wanted to touch on a new article from the Bitsy Academy. This actually dropped on Friday, but I was moving. Oh, by the way, I'm in my new house. It's not all set up yet, but at least my office, I've got some light in here and microphone and all that. So it'll start to look nicer eventually. Anyways, this dropped on Friday.

Starting point is 00:21:16 This is an article on the Bitsy Academy from Vlad Castaa. Kudos. Again, thanks Vlad for writing this. It's all about Bitcoin time locks, which is a smart contract mechanism that can be used on Bitcoin and kind of the interesting ways in which it can be used in concert with other mechanisms like multi-sig. A lot of the, a lot of people, when you think of smart

Starting point is 00:21:40 contracts on Bitcoin if you're aware that they exist, which they do. Multi-sig is the most common one where you decide who and how somebody can spend the conditions in which coins can be spent. But time locks add the condition of time. This Bitcoin cannot be spent until a particular block or until a particular actual point in time. And when you put those things in concert, you actually can do some. very, very interesting things with Bitcoin itself. And so Vlad does a good job of breaking down the various types of time locks that you can do on Bitcoin and what they can be used for and kind of

Starting point is 00:22:22 what the future may hold. So with that, I'm going to wrap up, you guys. Thank you so much for watching. As always, if you're here on YouTube, do hit like, subscribe, and share. Also, make sure you check out the other platforms I'm on. I am on Facebook Live. I do stream to D-Live. Twitch and Twitter via Periscope. There's a bunch of stuff. Also, I'm on every single, well, not every single, but basically every podcast platform you could really want in audio only. So be sure to subscribe there if you're more of an audio file. And other than that, if you want to help the show in another way, you can hit up the sponsor Ledin down below, get that $53 bucks. You can pick up a ledger down below. Or if you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a lightning network

Starting point is 00:23:06 tip at my tippin.me page. That is tippin.combe slash at BTC sessions. And with that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful rest of the day, wonderful evening. And I will see you next time for your daily session.

BTC Sessions - Miner Proves CSW Fraud, 70K BTC Coinjoined, Iran Mining EP061

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